Video Transcript: Craft Keepers to Trim the Fat (Karen Friedman)

Video Transcript: Craft Keepers to Trim the Fat (Karen Friedman) 

Hi, I'm Karen Friedman. As a reporter I covered a lot of horrific stories, most notably Gary Hynek known for kidnapping, imprisoning and torturing women. The defense attorney, however, was a charismatic Philadelphia lawyer named Charles Peruto, Jr. and he never met a camera that he didn't like, when it was announced that he was taking the case I shoved a microphone at him and I said, Mr. Peruto, why would you defend this man? He replied, I'll give you 1 million reasons why, in media land, we call that a keeper. It's a short, crispy, catchy snippet that drives the point home in a memorable and an interesting way. 

But you don't have to be a media darling to craft keepers in your talks and messages and in your business presentations. Think about how you can spice up your material with visual images and examples. 

For example, instead of saying 362,000 people will attend the event, which is a number that people probably can't remember Anyway, what if you said that's three times the size of our local stadium? Here's some tips to help you zing up your copy. 

First, be your own editor. 

Go through every segment and ask yourself whether it adds to what you're writing or saying or whether it doesn't. If it doesn't, get rid of it. Try paraphrasing to see if you can say the same thing using fewer words. 

Then there's the USA Today approach. 

Pretend you're speaking to USA Today readers, and that will help you put concepts in the simplest terms possible to make it understandable for others.

Apply analogies, simple analogies, they create visual impressions that are catchy and memorable, such as fingernails on a chalkboard. Or maybe if you don't like that one, things like it was so hot, you could fry an egg on the pavement. That's the kind of analogy we're talking about. There memorable. 

Next, ad copy approach. 

ads are written to address people's wants and needs. So think about using words that appeal to our once using words that stress the benefits of a product or service, or it's like energy efficient, leakproof, long lasting.

Finally tweeted, if you only had 140 characters to make your words matter, how would you say it? 

Tweeting is a great exercise for trimming the fat. 

Until next time. I'm Karen Friedman.